A quiet, cloudy, cooler day with light rain. As we haven’t had a cloudy nor cool day since near the Oregon Coast, it feels really good. We devoted the day to doing exploring the city, bike tune-ups, doing laundry and spending time with friends.

Reflection from Joe: Two Better Angels of Our Nature.

The day before yesterday I observed two people who came and went like angels. They helped that day, and they had sweet wakes behind them that are lifting me still and causing me to reflect on how there are opportunities to help all around us.

The first “angel” was an exchange student from France. Though I sat with her at a restaurant table outside of the Lochsa Lodge near the Lolo Pass, she was journaling and I was reading a book so beyond the quickest of “where are you from and what are you doing in this remote stretch of Idaho?” type conversation, I know nothing about her.

The moon was rising from the mountain in front of us when we heard a loud thud. A small yellow song bird had flown full speed into the big plate glass window behind us and now lay nearly motionless but quivering on the patio below the window. Several diners turned their heads to try to figure out what had occurred. The small yellow songbird lay quivering on its side on the patio floor in front of the window. There were a few gasps. I heard one person ask to nobody in particular if the bird was dead.

The exchange student walked over and gently picked the bird up with a napkin. A diner who was closest to the bird asked the young woman “are you going to put it out of its misery?” to which she didn’t reply. She carried the bird over to the rail of the patio and made a small bed of paper napkins. She righted the bird and gently stroked its back . She then took a butter knife, poured a drop of water on the far end, and held it in front of the bird’s beak. For at least five minutes she held it there in front of the tiny bird’s beak with no response that I could see, but later I was surprised to see that the bird was trying to drink. The young woman then filled a teaspoon with water, brought it to the bird, who was was by then clearly drinking from it.

“I’m worried the bird has a broken wing or a broken leg” she said – the only thing she had said since she had started tending to the bird and to no one in particular – and kept the spoon at the bird’s beak as it sipped intermittently. This went on for many minutes and I was struck by how focused the young woman was on the bird, even as time passed with little change .

Then, with no apparent warning, the bird flew away, doing a few graceful curlicues in the air before flying off toward the mountain. The young woman sat down again at our table, gently smiled, and resumed her journaling…

The other “angel” who touched earth that same day had a very different physical form – he was brawny middle-aged sun-darkened working guy with a broad smile. Chris remembers flagging down his white pickup, but from my vantage he seemed to appear out of nowhere just when things were looking dire: energies very low after 50 miles of steady uphill riding, the relentless sun straight above us with no significant shade, the stultifying heat we have had so much of in the afternoons relentlessly bearing down on us . Before we knew it Chris and Mary Ann’s bikes were in the truck. He asked Chris how far it was to the lodge. Twenty miles Chris said. No problem .

This angel was named Mike. No doubt given his rig, demeanor, and industrious comportment, Mike was on his way to do something useful when he stopped to help our team at a crucial moment, but you would never have known that watching him in action at that pulloff. One of the things I will remember most is him pulling six packs of ice-cold Gatorade from a cooler in the back of us pickup and placing bottles in each of our hands. I can’t think of an ice cold drink ever tasting so good. And then he was off down the road, with me thinking who was that guy and how did he materialize out of seeming nowhere at that exact moment?

I believe we all leave wakes behind us every day. Wakes can be gentle and gently lift things, or they can be damaging . Most of us are pretty unaware of our wakes, but they’re there, and we have the ability to make them helpful and not destructive.

A lot of you reading this knew Fran Hullsiek, who was a model of finding opportunities to be an angel many times. What Fran taught me wad that it’s not only willingness to be a Good Samaritan if the opportunity presents itself , it’s also the gift of being able to SEE those opportunities that most of us don’t because we’re going above our lives.

So here’s to the angels of Monday in Idaho: May the spirit of the young woman who nursed the bird soar as that bird did. May someone swoop into Mike’s life someday when he is in need, and maybe hand him some ice-cold Gatorade before smiling and then setting off in a cloud of dust. And may we all find – look for and find – opportunities to be angels ourselves, because we’re all in this together.